Mills & Boon Christmas Set

CHAPTER FOUR

JEFFERSON CONTEMPLATED HOW Brook’s obvious terror stirred an emotion in him that he did not feel ready to identify and, in fact, felt a need to distance himself from.

He’d been living—despite the efforts of the townspeople—without the complication of untidy emotions for some time.

He’d give this woman—Brook Nelson, or whoever she was—a break. That didn’t mean he had to involve himself in her drama in any way. The house was ridiculously large. With the slightest effort, during the day he wouldn’t even know she was here.

Though that might pose some challenges, because she was in his living room now, and despite the fact the windows let in all kinds of light, it was as if sunshine had poured into the room with her. She flounced into his living room, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, lips pursed.

“Wow,” she said.

He thought she was referring to the architecture, which generally inspired awe, but she turned disapproving eyes to him. “Good grief, I can see neither Mandy nor Clementine got to this room. You mustn’t have allergies. How long since this has been dusted?”

“A while,” he admitted, instead of never.

“And I take it, it would have gone a while longer if it weren’t for the photo shoot?”

“That’s correct.”

“You are a true bachelor, aren’t you? Why live in such a beautiful house if you aren’t going to take care of it?” she wailed with genuine frustration.

“I’m a widower,” he said tersely.

He was not sure why he had imparted that little piece of information. He hoped it wasn’t because he thought that would make her more sympathetic to his slovenliness than being a bachelor would.

But, as soon as he saw the sympathy blaze in her eyes, he realized he did not want her sympathy. Arriving in Anslow as an orphan, losing his wife, Jefferson Stone had experienced enough sympathy to last him a lifetime. He did not want any more challenges to his armor. He realized he needed to be much more vigilant in his separation of the professional and personal.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a low whisper that could make a man long for a bit of softness in his life.

But he had had softness, Jefferson reminded himself, and had proved himself entirely unworthy of it.

He lifted a shoulder in defense against the sympathy that blazed in her eyes. “My wife was the architect who designed the house.”

“Ah, that explains a lot.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

“You don’t really seem like the type of person who would be amenable to having your home photographed. You are honoring her. That’s nice.”

Jefferson really didn’t want her to think he was nice, and he squinted dangerously at her.

She got the message, because she moved over to an enlarged black-and-white photo on the wall.

“Who is this?”

The people responsible for the fact you haven’t been sent packing. “It’s me, with my grandparents, in front of the old house.”

“It’s a very powerful photograph.”

That’s what Hailey had said, too. She wasn’t into hanging family portraits, but she had unearthed this photo and had it enlarged to four feet by six feet and transferred to canvas.

“How old are you in it?”

“Six.”

She turned and looked at him. “How come you look so sad?” she asked.

He started. Hailey had never asked a single question about the photo. She had considered it an art piece. She had liked the composition, the logs of the old house, the dog on the porch, the hayfork leaning against the railing.

This woman was looking at him as if all his losses were being laid out before her, and he hated it.

“My parents had just died.” He kept his tone crisp, not inviting any comment, but he saw the stricken look on her face before she turned away from him and ran her finger along the bottom of the frame.

She looked at her finger but didn’t say anything. Her expression said it all. She felt sorry for him. No, it was more than sorry. She was, he could tell, despite the lie about her name, the softhearted type. She didn’t just feel sorry for him. Her heart was breaking for him. And he hated that.

“This is a temporary position,” he said, his voice cold. “After the photo shoot, I’ll return to companionship of my dust bunnies. Maybe you want to consider if two weeks employment is what you are really looking for.”

It was a last-ditch effort to let her know this position probably was not going to work for her. Or him.

“Temporary works perfectly for me,” she said, as if that made it cosmically ordained. “Two weeks. I have a lot to do.”

She had been careful not to express sympathy, and yet Jefferson felt her I have a lot to do could somehow mean rescuing him. Just a second. Wasn’t he rescuing her? And if she thought she was going to turn the tables on him, she was in for an ugly surprise.

“We haven’t come to terms yet. What do you expect for remuneration?”

“I haven’t passed the free-day test yet.”

He looked at her face. The softness lingered, but he was willing to bet she was one of those overachiever types. He deduced if she set out to impress, he would be impressed.

“Let’s assume,” he said drily.

She named a figure that seemed criminally low. But then she added, “Plus room and board, of course.”

Jefferson stared at her. Why was this coming as a surprise to him? Obviously, some fear had sent her down his driveway, and just as obviously she was not eager to go back to it.

“I’m in the middle of relocating,” Brook said vaguely. Then, as if sensing how disconcerted he was, she added, “This looks like a huge place. There must be a spare bedroom? Or two? Or a dozen?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Besides, if I’m going to be a proper housekeeper, I should probably make you some meals. That would be easier to do in residence, don’t you think?”

He saw it again. Behind her I’m-going-to-be-the-best-housekeeper-in-the-world bravado was terror.

She wanted to stay here.

Under his roof and his protection. He supposed if you were looking for a place to hide, the Stone House fit the bill quite nicely, as long as the things you were hiding from were outside of yourself.

Jefferson wondered if his new housekeeper would feel quite so eager to seek shelter here if she knew how colossally he had failed the one other woman, his wife, who had expected protection from him.

Meals. He hadn’t really even considered a housekeeper providing meals. His search for a housekeeper had been motivated strictly by getting the house ready for the magazine photo shoot. He considered telling her meals would not be part of their agreement but found himself oddly reluctant to do so. He had not had a home-cooked meal in longer than he could remember, and his mouth was watering. His weakness annoyed him.

“Look,” he told Brook sternly. “Against my better judgment, I’m giving you a chance, but be warned, if you chatter, you’re out of here.”

She looked as if she might say something. But then she pursed her lips, brought her fingers up, locked and put the imaginary key in her pocket. But before he could even be properly relieved, she reached into that imaginary pocket, took out the key and unlocked her lips.

“Maybe just before we begin our vow of silence, I should get you to show me around and you can tell me what you’d like to see prioritized. I’ll make a list of what each room needs.”

It was a reasonable request, and he knew he could not really refuse it.

“Let’s begin here,” she coaxed, when he was silent.

“This room is the great room,” he said. “I noticed the windows are rain spotted.”

“The windows would be a priority,” she agreed. “But I should probably leave them until right before the photo shoot so they just sparkle that day, right?”

“Right,” he said, though of course he had not thought of that.

“Dusting.” She looked up at the high vault of the ceiling. “You have a ladder somewhere? I see cobwebs up there.”

He frowned up at where she was looking. He did not like spiders. Before he answered, she went and slapped the couch, and a cloud of dust flew up from it. “Vacuuming. If the weather stays nice, I might even put the furniture outside for a bit to air it out.”

He couldn’t really imagine she was going to get all that furniture outside by herself. The sectional was huge. And apparently she was going to need a ladder. Actually, he was not going to let her up on a ladder, so there was no point in finding one. He needed to make it clear he was not going to be roped into interaction with her. He was going to protest, but then she went on.

“It smells faintly stale in here. I think a good airing of the furniture will change that.”

It smelled stale in his house?

“For the photo shoot,” she said, a little pensively, “it might be nice to make it look lived in. You don’t use this room much, do you?”

“Not really.” She was proving to be uncomfortably astute.

“What would you think if we set it up a bit?”

We?

“We could just add a bit of color. Maybe a bright throw over the couch, a few glossy magazines on display, a vase of flowers.”

“Don’t you think the photographer will do that?”

“Well, if he doesn’t think to bring a vase of flowers with him, you’d be out of luck, since the nearest vase of fresh flowers would be quite a distance away. I could make the throw. I’ll snoop around and see what you have.”

He must have looked unconvinced because she rushed on, “You’d be surprised what you can make things out of. And I’m pretty handy with a needle and thread. I made this blouse.”

That made him stare at the blouse for an uncomfortable second.

Thankfully, she had moved on. “It’s just that this room—the house—is so beautiful, but it doesn’t look very homey. It would make me happy to help it look its very best.”

He stared at her. She already appeared much happier than she had when she first arrived, that little furrow of worry easing on her brow.

“I’ll leave it up to you to spruce it up however you see fit. If you need to buy a few things, let me know,” he said, and was annoyed that he felt he was giving in to her in some subtle but irreversible way. “Stay out of my office. And my bedroom.”

The fact that he did not want her in his bedroom, that most intimate of spaces, alerted him to the fact she—this little mite of a woman in her homemade blouse with her wayward curls—was threatening him in some way that he had not allowed himself to be threatened in, in a very long time. If ever.

“But surely they’ll want to photograph those rooms, too?”

“I’m quite capable of getting two rooms ready.” His tone was curt and did not invite any more discussion, but he was aware that she had to bite her lip to keep herself from discussing it.

“I’ll show you the kitchen,” he said stiffly, leading her through to that room.

“Whoa,” she said, following him, “now this is a room you use.”

She didn’t say it as if it was a good thing.

He looked at the kitchen through her eyes. The sink was full of dishes. She didn’t know yet, but so was the oven. His mail was sliding off the kitchen table, and there were several envelopes on the floor. The counter by the coffeemaker was littered with grounds and sticky spoons. He often tromped up from the beach, wet, across the deck and through the kitchen. His bare footprints were outlined against the dark hardwood of a floor he’d allowed to become distinctly grimy.

Instead of looking daunted by the mess, she gave him a smile. “You need me way more than you thought you did.”

He looked at her. In this room, as in the living room, it felt as if her presence had made the light come on.

He had the terrible feeling that maybe he did need her more than he had thought he did. His life had become a gray wash of work and isolation.

And damn it, he told himself, he liked it that way. What he didn’t like was that Brook had been in his domain for only a few minutes, and he already was seeing things about himself that he had managed to avoid for a long, long time.

“Look, I have work to do,” he said. “I’m going to let you poke around the rest of the place by yourself. I’m sure it will become very quickly apparent to you what needs to be done.”

He could have left then, but he watched as she wandered over to where the mail had fallen on the floor.

“This one is marked Urgent,” she said. She came across the distance that separated them and held out the envelope. He reached for it.

For just a moment, their hands brushed. Something tingled along his spine, an electrical awareness of her. She might have felt something, too, because she spun away from him and went to the kitchen counter. It had a long, sleek window that overlooked the lake. But she did not look out the window. She opened up a cupboard.

“Is this what you’re eating?” she asked him, holding up a soup can, and then setting that down and holding up a stew can.

He folded his arms over his chest, uninviting.

She ignored that. “Canned food is very high in sodium,” she told him. “At your age, you have to watch things like that.”

“My age?” he sputtered.

And then she laughed. It was a tinkling sound, as refreshing as a brook finding its way over pebbles.

“Do you have any fresh food?”

“Not really. There might be a few things in the freezer.”

“That’s not fresh. What do you eat?”

He thought of the stacks of microwavable meals in the freezer. “Whatever I feel like,” he said grouchily.

“Never mind, I’ll make a grocery list. How do you get the perishables here? In this heat? I guess ice cream is out of the question.”

“I take the boat and a cooler,” he said. “Anslow is quicker by water.”

“You take a boat for groceries?”

“In the summer, yes.”

“That’s very romantic.”

And then she blushed. And well she should. You did not discuss romance with your employer!

“If you make a list, I’ll do a run tomorrow.” That hardly sounded like a reprimand for discussing romance with him! It sounded like a concession to her feminine presence in his house!

“Oh, good,” she said. “I’ll be happy to prepare some meals if I have the right ingredients.”

There was that whole meal thing again. A strong man would have just said no, that it was not part of her job, and that he was more than capable of looking after himself. But Jefferson had that typical man’s weakness for food.

“What kind of meals?” he heard himself ask. He tried to think of the last time he’d had a truly decent meal. It was definitely when he’d been away on business, a great restaurant in Portland, if he recalled.

Home cooked had not been part of his vocabulary for over a decade, not since his grandmother had died. How she had loved to cook, old-fashioned meals of turkey or roast beef, mashed potatoes and rich gravy. The meal was always followed with in-season fruit pie—rhubarb, apple, cherry. When he had first moved in with his grandparents, his grandma had still made her own ice cream.

Hailey had been as busy with her career as he himself was. She liked what she called “nouveau cuisine,” which she did not cook herself. She had made horrified faces at the feasts he fondly remembered his grandmother providing.

“It is not healthy to eat like that,” she had told him.

And yet he could never remember feeling healthier than when his stomach was full of his grandmother’s good food.

Jefferson remembered, suddenly and sharply, he and Hailey arguing about this very kitchen.

“Double ovens?” he’d said, when they met the kitchen designer. “We’ll never use those.”

“The caterers will appreciate it when we entertain.”

Why had he argued with her about it? Why had he argued with her about anything? As they had built the house, it had seemed as if the arguments had become unending.

If a man only knew how short time could be, and how unexpectedly everything could change... Jefferson felt the sharpness of regret nip at his heels. Somehow, it felt as if Brook, nosing through his fridge, was the reason for this regret. He usually was able to bury himself in work. It prevented being bothered by pesky emotions and, worse, by guilt.

Brook closed the fridge door and opened the freezer side of the huge French-door-styled appliance. She stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, staring at the neatly stacked boxes of single-serving freezer foods.

“I’ll make that list,” she said, obviously dismissing everything in the freezer as inedible.

“You do that,” he said.

Apparently, she meant to make a list right now, while the lack was fresh in her mind. She found a piece of paper on the counter, and a pen. Her brow furrowed with concentration, and as she wrote, she muttered out loud.

“Chicken. Chocolate chips. Flour. Sugar...”

Chocolate chips. And flour. And sugar. Was she going to make cookies? Jefferson felt some despicable weakness inside himself at the very thought of a homemade cookie.

She had obviously been distracted from her request to see the house. “I’m expecting a call in a few minutes, so if you’ll excuse me,” he said.

Jefferson eased himself out of the room. His mouth had begun watering at the mention of chicken. Again, his thoughts went to his grandmother and platters of golden fried chicken in the middle of the old plank table.

It was a weakness, but he had no power to fight it. Besides, so what? She was signing on as his housekeeper, if she wanted to cook a few things, why shouldn’t he be the beneficiary? He’d be signing the paychecks, after all. There were no worries that she would be as good a cook as his grandmother had been. No one was that good a cook.

CHAPTER FIVE

AS SHE WATCHED him go, Angie realized that, in her eagerness not to annoy her new employer with anything that could even remotely be construed as chattiness, she had not asked him his name. Now he was in full retreat and she didn’t know where his cleaning supplies were kept or where he would like her to stay.

Instead, she watched mutely as he stalked away, down a wide hallway, turned and disappeared from view. A moment later she had heard the slamming of a door.

Considering how unfriendly he was, Angie contemplated what she was feeling. She felt as if she understood his unfriendliness. Her new employer was a man who had lost everything.

For the first time in a long time—far too long, in fact—Angie was aware that it was not all about her. She had seen in his face that he would not brook any sympathy from her, and though her first impulse had been to offer some, she had listened to her instincts. There were other ways to let him know she had heard him and seen him. There were other ways to offer comfort. After the public humiliation of her broken engagement, she personally knew how hollow words could feel.

Her boss had become an orphan when he was six, and now he was a widower. She remembered the shattered-glass look in his eyes when he had revealed that about himself, and his quick rejection of what he had perceived as sympathy even though she had not said a word.

He didn’t want sympathy, and she did not blame him. He wanted to be left alone, and she did not blame him for that, either.

But he had let her into his house, and that was a gift to her. She would give him a gift, too. She vowed she would be the best housekeeper the world had ever seen. She vowed for the next two weeks, she would make her employer’s life a little bit easier in any way that she could.

Angie contemplated the feeling in her. It was nice that it was not terror. What was it?

She felt safe.

Maybe his unfriendliness even made her feel safer. Look where seemingly friendly male interest had landed her last time, after all!

But no matter the reasons, for the first time since she had bolted after finding that stuffed panda on her bed, she felt something in her relax. Really, the tension had been increasing for months, as it became more and more apparent Winston’s interest in her was not healthy.

Now, it was as if she had exhaled, after a long, long period of holding her breath. Looking around the neglected house, it felt extraordinary to have a purpose beyond her own survival.

With that exhale came a sensation of pure exhaustion, and she let her eyes wander longingly to the hammock that she could see through the kitchen window. But falling asleep would be no way to make a good first impression or forward her goal of making her boss’s life a little better!

She made herself focus on the task at hand. From the stack of leaning mail that had taken over the beautiful harvest-style kitchen table, she presumed his name was Jefferson Stone and that he was a business consultant who owned a company called Stone Systems Analysis. She made a mental note to sort the mail for him. Some was obviously junk, but some of those envelopes just as obviously contained checks and business correspondence.

The kitchen cabinets revealed a rather impoverished selection of food. As she went through the cupboards, her grocery list was becoming quite extensive, especially since the thought of cooking for him now was imbued with her sense of altruism.

After she had finished in the kitchen, she went exploring. Off the kitchen was a laundry room. When she opened the washing machine it had wet clothes in it that had been sitting so long they smelled dank. She found the soap and restarted the cycle. The soap was in a cabinet sadly lacking in the cleaning supplies necessary to keep a house. She retrieved her list and added a few more items.

Moving on, feeling like something of a snoop, which was ridiculous, she showed herself around the house. Though from the outside it looked as if it was only one level, she took a stairway off the kitchen that led downward to the next level.

It was not really a basement, but a beautiful above-ground lower level, set up for entertaining. It had a billiards table and a bar, but the cover on the table and the dust on the bottles at the bar suggested no one had entertained down here for a very long time. There was a huge TV on one wall. It looked as if Jefferson did watch that, as there were several smudged drink glasses on the coffee table and a bowl that contained the crumbs of potato chips.